Apple's small share of the personal computer market has been creeping up, helped at least in part by the relative ease of use of iLife, its multimedia application suite.
The latest version, iLife '09, adds some interesting innovations such as face recognition and “geo- tagging” in the core iPhoto application, not to mention music lessons in GarageBand, Apple's music composition software.
Designed to rival the bundled software accompanying a Windows-based PC – such as Paint, Picture Manager and Movie Maker – iLife '09 comes free with a new Mac, including the MacBook Pro models launched this week. It costs $79 (￡69 in the UK) as an upgrade for Mac users running MacOS X 10.5.6 or later. I have been using iLife '09 on a fairly new MacBook Pro but I also installed it on an older iMac desktop, which took about 10 hitch-free minutes.